Errors, Patterns & Repetitions from Jacqueline Arias on Vimeo.
Ryan Dobran’s Story One exists only in a fugitive, self-produced edition, though there should be copies left if you ask him. (The publication accompanied a gallery collaboration with the artist Jacqueline Arias, of which Arias' portion can be seen above, as part of a show called 'Former Islands'. The show also had wall posters of Dobran's poem "Fantasy Index", published in Cordite Review.) Following on from Dobran’s previous books – Your Guilt is a Miracle (Bad Press, 2008), Ding Ding (Critical Documents, 2009), Confection ((c)_(c) Press, 2011), Shouts from OK Glamour (Barque Press, 2013), and Remote Carbon (Critical Documents, 2014) – it’s gnarly and difficult work, characterized by a particular biting tone which certainly approaches sarcasm, but it offers an explicit and immediate directness distinct from his previous work. As its title indicates, it has a quasi-narrative framing, centred on the domestic preparation for work and the work that is done in the work-place itself. Beginning “at the beginning”, the tone, ventriloquizing as it does various familiar discourses around office work and its frames, is often brutally direct. It’s very quotable – there are killer lines on most every page. But, despite the narrative and the presence of a central first-person speaker who functions as something like a ‘character’, its narrative doesn’t resolve or offer closure – it is a perpetual present characterized by incremental change which doesn’t change anything but merely repeats, an implicitly cyclical and easily-recognisable structure of routine whose exaggerations occur in the telling. Though the numbering of the title suggests that this is the first of many – a start, if not a new one, it also suggests a singularity, both unique and utterly familiar. This is it. Importantly, it’s a story in which not much actually happens. Banal events are stretched out into luxuriantly cynical description – the moment of waking, showering, slicing a fruit, parking a car – while environmental change, globalized warfare and the workings of international capital become larger frames which can’t be afforded the same narrative clarity, appearing to provide an alarming shift of scale which is nonetheless at every turn related to these minutiae, whether explicitly or implicitly.
Dobran writes (in personal communication):
It’s definitely a departure in terms of clause structure at least and I was going for a pseudo-narrative that keeps restarting. I was desperately trying to be funny, and I often think about the link between the desire to laugh and the intractable and putatively ineluctable position that one can feel beleaguered by when locked into a job whose hours one counts. I think it must be some kind of “cruel optimism” that sets the restlessness along with a middle-class upbringing whose creators conspired to make their children think that holding open possibility for what may come--and indeed what should come provided enough hard work--is itself a form of necessity. But on the other side of cruel optimism is beneficent pessimism, whose feeling of immobilization is linked to the same social reality but whose manoeuvring is without any desire at all.That final sentence references Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), a book which explores how European and American fantasies of the good life and of a work-ethic based doctrine of achievement (what Berlant calls, "conventional good-life fantasies – say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work”) are still held to even after it has become clear through periods of crisis that liberal capitalist democracy cannot provide them. Such a relation to the present continues despite being disproved, centred on various intricate modes of adjustment. For Berlant, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” The continuing process of survival – staying afloat – involved in sustaining some sort of relation to this object of desire, this fantasy of fulfilment, even when it is clearly unattainable becomes so total that “the loss of what’s not working is more unbearable than the having of it, and vice versa.” These methods of coping (what Berlant calls “norms of self-management”), then, do not remove the initial desire but sustain it.
Dobran’s ‘beneficent pessimism’ instead embraces this immobilisation and removes desire. Both relations involve a certain pose of cynicism, but this doesn’t mean they’re total – as, in Dobran’s poem, the speaker treads a gamut between a kind of numb, almost thoughtless physical functioning and outbursts of sadness in love or brutally comic competitive violence. This is itself a means of adjustment, but one whose mode of survival doesn’t aim at the sustaining of the desire it knows is blocked. The speaker doesn’t expect the kinds of sustaining relations – to work-place, domestic partnership, etc – that still motivate Berlant’s cruel optimists. Instead, lack of belief is what allows the worker in the poem to fulfil their tasks as if they believed in them. Such a lack might, in other context, be the grounds for attempting change – rebellion, rejection, nihilism or politically-transformative collective action, as it might manifest in life-style dropping-out, work-place sabotage, organizing, protest, etc. Perhaps it’s too fanciful to suggest that the book’s red and black cover might jokingly hint at the political tendencies associated with those colours – communism and anarchism – to suggest their near-total absence in the world and mind-set the poem so convincingly and rigorously inhabits. Pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will. Now carry on.
The poem occasionally shifts its focus to imagine cosmic scenarios of destruction which are nonetheless almost entirely filtered through limited and limiting perspectives, the modes of mediation they would seek to reach beyond in sublime transformation. At one point, Dobran writes: “I don’t think any of us / has the story we most want / to fulfil the proud suggestions / from EARTH.” The shift from singular to plural here suggests both the supposed ‘universality’ of ‘the story’ that is desired and its miserable limitation to a failed individualism. What none of us have is what each of us want, separately, even if the particular scenario desired seems like the most personal thing. The capitalized “Earth” itself comes up with all sorts of helpful suggestions which cannot be made to fit a narrative frame which would contain and fulfill them. Choose your own adventure. However, as in Berlant’s cruel optimism, even the contained and stereotypical story of effort and success, centred on work, the nuclear family, and a libidinal investment in a particular economic model, cannot be fulfilled.
The ‘adjustment’ to the working day described in the poem sometimes veers to statements of patently false enthusiasm – “the beauty of the globe is real”; “I await / the greatest day” – though it’s worth noting that such instances of beauty occur precisely at the moment of destruction, of negation, the moment when the earth explodes in nuclear holocaust and the light is registered on the “beatific space station”. On the other hand, there is cynical description of continuing routine, void of any connection to the sublime beauty of cosmic destruction within “the stupid days” of the work routine. Adjustment to work routine must negotiate between the modes of forcibly internalised enthusiasm conventionally said to lead to promotion, betterment, and the like, and a relentless cynicism which must nonetheless operate almost entirely within the frame of that which it criticises. What is outside work in the poem is only “wasted free time” and the promise of last night (associated, perhaps, with desire, fantasy, dream), which is itself dismissed – “Everything that last night meant is shit.”
Dobran’s poem, with its ventriloquism of the masculinist logics of patriotic imperialism – “nuke this motherfucking coffee”, “inhabit the dude without lifting the brow” – sees the toxic masculinity that might be found in an office space as inseparable from the logics of violent, patriotic imperialism, as bolstered by an economy churning along on a good life mentality (both ones of simultaneous suppression and release). In this sense, the speaker of the poem may find links along a collective fantasy of violence, national identity, gender identity, class identity (or aspiration), but these are ones which will not allows any real solidarity to emerge, which are defined and perpetrated on violence of various kinds against others, even colleagues. Thus, the joke about beating up someone who “comes round to take my spot / at the sink basin”; or, “I will use your face to destroy / the manager.” This is not worker solidarity, even if it is posed against some manifestation of authority (albeit a localized one). The speaker uses two other people to destroy themselves for his own advantage, perhaps in order to replace the manager. If that is the implication, destroying them is not a destruction of the structural position that the particular person in this case designated as ‘manager’ fills and represents; it redirects to personal antagonism a broader (let’s say, class) analysis. (Though it’s worth noting that such talk of the ‘structural’ might risk a kind of fatalistic purity of investigative method. For a recent work that insistently and even obsessively explores the dynamic between a cartoonish, personally-based antagonism and a structural approach – one which might be said to characterise different trends in contemporary U.K. and U.S. political poetry and theatre in various ways – see Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon’s David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs (Shit Valley, 2015); also Danny Hayward’s review of the same in Hix Eros 6).
In any case, the promise of “us[ing] your face to destroy / the manager” is something of an empty threat. The future-tense injunction has something of the character of an earlier and yet more ridiculous injunction in which the speaker barks out: “Give me pleasure, shower.” This injunction is a rhetorical pose which suggests power even as it knows the mechanized comfort-givers associated with the good life bestow only a limited horizon of actual comfort and power. If the animate holds no promise, the inanimate must substitute. The shower’s pleasure-giving both has the structure of an exploitative demand and acknowledges the speaker’s lack of agency which the statement of command attempts to disguise.
As I’ve suggested above, the poem’s title brings up the relation of story, routine, agency and patterning. In telling their own ‘story’, the poet here merely attests to the crushingly and fatalistically pre-determined narrative which labour forces most everyone to accept, all the way from the shower to the desk. As a fragment from Kafka’s journals which is (twice) set in devastating form in György Kurtág’s 1987 Kafka Fragments has it: “Slept, woke, slept, woke. Miserable life.” There is nothing unique about this narrative content, and neither does it reflect collective or instructive values: it is at once particular, alienated, individualised, a cell, and crushingly familiar, skewed into repetition at both ends of the scale. It is a condition presented as unchangeable and permanent and yet also permanently subject to anxiety, lack of safety, the threat of losing your place even within this crushing process, the motions you will not any longer be allowed to go through. So this story, the first and the last, will be just another template, yet also one which self-destructs, just as work routine is locked in cycles of starting and re-starting that don’t necessarily ‘progress’ – though progress that (in meagre drip-feed fashion) is the aim (the discourses of self-betterment, promotion, and the like; sell yourself more, sell yourself better, devote your whole life to the task, for everyone’s good).
More broadly, this might also relate to periodic financial crisis and recovery, boom and bust, as part of a neo-liberal economic consensus, or a purported, forced and manufactured consensus, which is imagined to have finished with narrative for good (ends of history), but in which the constant recurrence of crisis, collapsing, recovering, re-starting, collapsing, recovering, etc, constantly belies that narrative end-point. The story, from beginning to end, can never end, even as it is said to have already ended: it will always repeat, with its minor fluctuations, crises and supposed resolutions, with everyone playing the role of the characters whose actions, whatever their motivations, must always conform to the same predictable patterns.
Likewise, the notion of effort and self-bettering is no longer manifested in (certain kinds of) physical labour, given that those physical elements of work have reduced in visibility and importance, present only through the distance of time and space. Thus, the shift from blue-collar to white-collar, from assembly line to desk, the shift in ‘the west’ from industrial to tertiary industries as the result of the mass out-sourcing of industry to places abroad where labour is cheap and protective regulations less present. So that there is a kind of indifference or apathy set off by a sense of that global positioning within systems of exploitation, which must also figure with a sense of one’s own exploitation – reckoning with different levels of privilege which the discourses of American Maoism might term ‘labour aristocracy’, working through that global and specific class dynamic in which: “I continue to thrive as a result / of my steadfast commitment to / servicing the petite-bourgeois / home improvement / industry.” (Note here how the job itself, which aims at a balance with the domestic sphere necessary to complete the circle of the well-contained good life, loops back into the domestic whose raison d’etre it is to bolster.) The office workers eat their lunch: “Everyone just sits there in a vat of space / starving the poor. Keep your fucking / text focus, poet-broker.” Being in the vat, it seems like they themselves are being cooked and eaten. The injunction to keep focussed suggests that the dramatic-bathetic statement ‘starving the poor’ is not the proper domain of the enclosed text-object-poem. It is not the deal or contract with the reader, with the demands for action it might make, that has been agreed. Of course, by ventriloquizing that position, the poet goes against it, even as the poem itself consciously sticks within certain limits. Such moments of underplayed extremity manifest a humour which is sometimes as violent as that situation, and sometimes as apathetic, which perhaps amount to the same thing. As Dobran puts it: “Humor is neither / defense nor protection, but stimulant. / The possibility of action is simply too / ridiculous.”
As any good story should, the poem begins “at the beginning”, with reference to a “plastic cradle” which is the flesh. The worker is re-born each day, progressing from the infantilism of waking (“more drool / than ga-ga”) to the ‘maturity’ necessary to accomplish the tasks of work which, perhaps, replaces the mother. Indeed, the text as a whole is notably male in its environs, even if the cast of characters beside the speaker remains something of a backdrop, barely even delineated in terms of physical description, let alone characteristic. Here, people are their role, whether that be in the job or in usurping the speaker’s place at the sink, a moment which leads to a bleakly comic outburst of responsive violence. Only towards the end does some element of what might be the traditional subject of the “lyric” that the poem at one point seems to name itself as – a love relation.
The book’s opening is reminiscent of Creation narratives: “at the beginning, at the left / off light” has something of the Book of Genesis about it, not only in its opening phrase but in the faint echo of God’s generative command, “let there be light”. The light here, however, has been switched off at some point (implying that this is not the first ‘beginning’, but one of many involved in a daily routine). The flesh-cradle is felt as an exterior shell, one that is synthetic rather than fleshly, or at once synthetic and fleshly. You sit in your flesh almost as if you sat the desk; it contains you, as your total environment. Detail is precise, but this leads, not to an attention to the object and its production, but to the entirely unexceptional: the “firm, / but not hard, plastic bottom” of the slippers, the page-long description of cutting a grapefruit in minute detail. “There is nothing less than ordinary / details configured in surprise / arrangements.” The phrasing here is subtly unusual – we might expect “nothing more”. ‘Nothing less’ suggests some sort of achievement, or grandeur, or, indeed, surprise. Expressing it in this way only reinforces how none of these things apply: for the surprise must not be too surprising. It must be predictable, within a certain field of expectation. The speaker goes on to talk about changing the alarm sound on their phone every day, in order not to fall back asleep: “the threat of behaviour / and any remarkable achievement / of habit”. Yet these are not things that can be perfected – or, their perfection is in their acknowledged imperfectness, their highly-functioning inadequacy as coping mechanisms and ways of living and surviving.
Once the alarm has gone off and the speaker is properly awake, they are able (in the second person) to assert the following: “You affirm at 06.34 ante-meridian / that the beauty of the globe is real. / and that your place on its fine. Just / or merely, don’t care.” ‘Fine’ can, of course, be both a term of particularly esteemed quality and the base-line of survival – not especially great, but I get by. It’s the common answer to a common greeting-question – ‘How are you?’ – whose connotations are determined by the inflection of the answer – ‘fine’. Similarly, ‘just’ is not here ‘justice’, but ‘nearly’ or ‘merely’. ‘Don’t care’ could either be an injunction, the speaker speaking to themselves or to the reader, as with the second-person of ‘you affirm’: a kind of negative mantra which nonetheless possesses a kind of self-help function. Beneficent pessimism – because you don’t care, you can get on by.
The poem occasionally shifts its focus to imagine cosmic scenarios of destruction which are nonetheless almost entirely filtered through limited and limiting perspectives, the modes of mediation they would seek to reach beyond in sublime transformation. At one point, Dobran writes: “I don’t think any of us / has the story we most want / to fulfil the proud suggestions / from EARTH.” The shift from singular to plural here suggests both the supposed ‘universality’ of ‘the story’ that is desired and its miserable limitation to a failed individualism. What none of us have is what each of us want, separately, even if the particular scenario desired seems like the most personal thing. The capitalized “Earth” itself comes up with all sorts of helpful suggestions which cannot be made to fit a narrative frame which would contain and fulfill them. Choose your own adventure. However, as in Berlant’s cruel optimism, even the contained and stereotypical story of effort and success, centred on work, the nuclear family, and a libidinal investment in a particular economic model, cannot be fulfilled.
The ‘adjustment’ to the working day described in the poem sometimes veers to statements of patently false enthusiasm – “the beauty of the globe is real”; “I await / the greatest day” – though it’s worth noting that such instances of beauty occur precisely at the moment of destruction, of negation, the moment when the earth explodes in nuclear holocaust and the light is registered on the “beatific space station”. On the other hand, there is cynical description of continuing routine, void of any connection to the sublime beauty of cosmic destruction within “the stupid days” of the work routine. Adjustment to work routine must negotiate between the modes of forcibly internalised enthusiasm conventionally said to lead to promotion, betterment, and the like, and a relentless cynicism which must nonetheless operate almost entirely within the frame of that which it criticises. What is outside work in the poem is only “wasted free time” and the promise of last night (associated, perhaps, with desire, fantasy, dream), which is itself dismissed – “Everything that last night meant is shit.”
Dobran’s poem, with its ventriloquism of the masculinist logics of patriotic imperialism – “nuke this motherfucking coffee”, “inhabit the dude without lifting the brow” – sees the toxic masculinity that might be found in an office space as inseparable from the logics of violent, patriotic imperialism, as bolstered by an economy churning along on a good life mentality (both ones of simultaneous suppression and release). In this sense, the speaker of the poem may find links along a collective fantasy of violence, national identity, gender identity, class identity (or aspiration), but these are ones which will not allows any real solidarity to emerge, which are defined and perpetrated on violence of various kinds against others, even colleagues. Thus, the joke about beating up someone who “comes round to take my spot / at the sink basin”; or, “I will use your face to destroy / the manager.” This is not worker solidarity, even if it is posed against some manifestation of authority (albeit a localized one). The speaker uses two other people to destroy themselves for his own advantage, perhaps in order to replace the manager. If that is the implication, destroying them is not a destruction of the structural position that the particular person in this case designated as ‘manager’ fills and represents; it redirects to personal antagonism a broader (let’s say, class) analysis. (Though it’s worth noting that such talk of the ‘structural’ might risk a kind of fatalistic purity of investigative method. For a recent work that insistently and even obsessively explores the dynamic between a cartoonish, personally-based antagonism and a structural approach – one which might be said to characterise different trends in contemporary U.K. and U.S. political poetry and theatre in various ways – see Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon’s David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs (Shit Valley, 2015); also Danny Hayward’s review of the same in Hix Eros 6).
In any case, the promise of “us[ing] your face to destroy / the manager” is something of an empty threat. The future-tense injunction has something of the character of an earlier and yet more ridiculous injunction in which the speaker barks out: “Give me pleasure, shower.” This injunction is a rhetorical pose which suggests power even as it knows the mechanized comfort-givers associated with the good life bestow only a limited horizon of actual comfort and power. If the animate holds no promise, the inanimate must substitute. The shower’s pleasure-giving both has the structure of an exploitative demand and acknowledges the speaker’s lack of agency which the statement of command attempts to disguise.
As I’ve suggested above, the poem’s title brings up the relation of story, routine, agency and patterning. In telling their own ‘story’, the poet here merely attests to the crushingly and fatalistically pre-determined narrative which labour forces most everyone to accept, all the way from the shower to the desk. As a fragment from Kafka’s journals which is (twice) set in devastating form in György Kurtág’s 1987 Kafka Fragments has it: “Slept, woke, slept, woke. Miserable life.” There is nothing unique about this narrative content, and neither does it reflect collective or instructive values: it is at once particular, alienated, individualised, a cell, and crushingly familiar, skewed into repetition at both ends of the scale. It is a condition presented as unchangeable and permanent and yet also permanently subject to anxiety, lack of safety, the threat of losing your place even within this crushing process, the motions you will not any longer be allowed to go through. So this story, the first and the last, will be just another template, yet also one which self-destructs, just as work routine is locked in cycles of starting and re-starting that don’t necessarily ‘progress’ – though progress that (in meagre drip-feed fashion) is the aim (the discourses of self-betterment, promotion, and the like; sell yourself more, sell yourself better, devote your whole life to the task, for everyone’s good).
More broadly, this might also relate to periodic financial crisis and recovery, boom and bust, as part of a neo-liberal economic consensus, or a purported, forced and manufactured consensus, which is imagined to have finished with narrative for good (ends of history), but in which the constant recurrence of crisis, collapsing, recovering, re-starting, collapsing, recovering, etc, constantly belies that narrative end-point. The story, from beginning to end, can never end, even as it is said to have already ended: it will always repeat, with its minor fluctuations, crises and supposed resolutions, with everyone playing the role of the characters whose actions, whatever their motivations, must always conform to the same predictable patterns.
Likewise, the notion of effort and self-bettering is no longer manifested in (certain kinds of) physical labour, given that those physical elements of work have reduced in visibility and importance, present only through the distance of time and space. Thus, the shift from blue-collar to white-collar, from assembly line to desk, the shift in ‘the west’ from industrial to tertiary industries as the result of the mass out-sourcing of industry to places abroad where labour is cheap and protective regulations less present. So that there is a kind of indifference or apathy set off by a sense of that global positioning within systems of exploitation, which must also figure with a sense of one’s own exploitation – reckoning with different levels of privilege which the discourses of American Maoism might term ‘labour aristocracy’, working through that global and specific class dynamic in which: “I continue to thrive as a result / of my steadfast commitment to / servicing the petite-bourgeois / home improvement / industry.” (Note here how the job itself, which aims at a balance with the domestic sphere necessary to complete the circle of the well-contained good life, loops back into the domestic whose raison d’etre it is to bolster.) The office workers eat their lunch: “Everyone just sits there in a vat of space / starving the poor. Keep your fucking / text focus, poet-broker.” Being in the vat, it seems like they themselves are being cooked and eaten. The injunction to keep focussed suggests that the dramatic-bathetic statement ‘starving the poor’ is not the proper domain of the enclosed text-object-poem. It is not the deal or contract with the reader, with the demands for action it might make, that has been agreed. Of course, by ventriloquizing that position, the poet goes against it, even as the poem itself consciously sticks within certain limits. Such moments of underplayed extremity manifest a humour which is sometimes as violent as that situation, and sometimes as apathetic, which perhaps amount to the same thing. As Dobran puts it: “Humor is neither / defense nor protection, but stimulant. / The possibility of action is simply too / ridiculous.”
* * *
As any good story should, the poem begins “at the beginning”, with reference to a “plastic cradle” which is the flesh. The worker is re-born each day, progressing from the infantilism of waking (“more drool / than ga-ga”) to the ‘maturity’ necessary to accomplish the tasks of work which, perhaps, replaces the mother. Indeed, the text as a whole is notably male in its environs, even if the cast of characters beside the speaker remains something of a backdrop, barely even delineated in terms of physical description, let alone characteristic. Here, people are their role, whether that be in the job or in usurping the speaker’s place at the sink, a moment which leads to a bleakly comic outburst of responsive violence. Only towards the end does some element of what might be the traditional subject of the “lyric” that the poem at one point seems to name itself as – a love relation.
The book’s opening is reminiscent of Creation narratives: “at the beginning, at the left / off light” has something of the Book of Genesis about it, not only in its opening phrase but in the faint echo of God’s generative command, “let there be light”. The light here, however, has been switched off at some point (implying that this is not the first ‘beginning’, but one of many involved in a daily routine). The flesh-cradle is felt as an exterior shell, one that is synthetic rather than fleshly, or at once synthetic and fleshly. You sit in your flesh almost as if you sat the desk; it contains you, as your total environment. Detail is precise, but this leads, not to an attention to the object and its production, but to the entirely unexceptional: the “firm, / but not hard, plastic bottom” of the slippers, the page-long description of cutting a grapefruit in minute detail. “There is nothing less than ordinary / details configured in surprise / arrangements.” The phrasing here is subtly unusual – we might expect “nothing more”. ‘Nothing less’ suggests some sort of achievement, or grandeur, or, indeed, surprise. Expressing it in this way only reinforces how none of these things apply: for the surprise must not be too surprising. It must be predictable, within a certain field of expectation. The speaker goes on to talk about changing the alarm sound on their phone every day, in order not to fall back asleep: “the threat of behaviour / and any remarkable achievement / of habit”. Yet these are not things that can be perfected – or, their perfection is in their acknowledged imperfectness, their highly-functioning inadequacy as coping mechanisms and ways of living and surviving.
Once the alarm has gone off and the speaker is properly awake, they are able (in the second person) to assert the following: “You affirm at 06.34 ante-meridian / that the beauty of the globe is real. / and that your place on its fine. Just / or merely, don’t care.” ‘Fine’ can, of course, be both a term of particularly esteemed quality and the base-line of survival – not especially great, but I get by. It’s the common answer to a common greeting-question – ‘How are you?’ – whose connotations are determined by the inflection of the answer – ‘fine’. Similarly, ‘just’ is not here ‘justice’, but ‘nearly’ or ‘merely’. ‘Don’t care’ could either be an injunction, the speaker speaking to themselves or to the reader, as with the second-person of ‘you affirm’: a kind of negative mantra which nonetheless possesses a kind of self-help function. Beneficent pessimism – because you don’t care, you can get on by.
On the same page, however, the speaker “begin[s] to care, / because there is plenty of time to care”– a care itself produced by “boredom”, but one which might be different to the “care / that you thought of / that time, at the edge of it” – the deictic reference, which could mean a care thought of at the edge of boredom, or of care itself. Care is both to look after something and to give a fuck – to care for (someone) or to care about (something). It would seem that the care that arises from boredom is the former, the care at the edge perhaps the latter – but the terms are deliberately vague. In a work routine characterized both by uber-specificity and amorphous vagueness – we never find out the exact details of the job; the ritual around it is more important that what exactly is done, what the job is ostensibly ‘for’ – you don’t need to care for anybody else, in some kind of loving relation, though you might need to ‘take care over’ your work, which isn’t exactly the same thing as caring about it.
Care might be taken as a positive which mitigates a negative – you have to take care of someone because they cannot take care of themselves – though, in its noun form, it originates as something profoundly negative in feeling. The affirmation involved in waking is a negative one – “Just / or merely, don’t care” – as is even the care which emerges from boredom or beyond. Likewise, we later read: “the life of lyric is a sad / fucking ministry of vapid / negation”. Lyric poetry – as this poem both is and isn’t a ‘lyric poem’, excluding in the main as it does the subject and address of love and passion – might, in this formulation, thus be construed to affirm, in the face of evidence otherwise, that the world really is beautiful and that ‘you’ fit into it quite comfortably, bolstered and encouraged to carry on as you are but your relative comfortable position of waged precarity. This is not traditionally what lyric does. But what Dobran terms “the crust of deformation” might be both the deformation of an alternative possibility of social life accomplished by the structures of wage-labour and their affective ‘crust’ – a merely ‘vapid’ negation’ – and the deformation of what is by which it is de-formed, destroyed, transformed into something else. This crust “waits upon the magnetic / personae” – waiting upon them like a servant, or waiting for them as the speaker “await[s] / the greatest day” (a phrase I’ll come onto in the next paragraph). The personae are magnetic, perhaps in the sense that they are charismatic, or compelling, or that anything can be stuck to them – they are personae that are waiting to be deformed, blank canvasses or shape shifters, not touched by a fixed particularity. Yet the crust which will stick to them, like a mask covering a volcanic explosion, the crust of the earth, or a dirty remainder, does so within “the infinity / of the singular” – both what is utterly reduced to an endlessly reproduced and common individuality of negation and – as Tom Allen suggests in a review of the poem for Hix Eros 6 – that which negates this negation, in which the singular and the common are neither falsely reconciled nor at odds.
This passage occurs after the following sentence, which again plays between the notions of beauty and the day being just the same as any other – particularity and sameness, newness and repetition: “Ready for beauty, I await / the greatest day.” An eschatological expectation seems to raise its head – the great day which shall surely come and which shall be infinitely stretched beyond the bounds of repetition, routine, sleeping, waking, living and dying, disappointment and loss. This is in itself the good life fantasy which Berlant discusses and which, I would argue, Frank O’Hara partially satirizes in his great ‘Ode to Joy’: “We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying.” That ‘we’, with its “cocktail bars” and “supper clubs”, is one determined by class exclusion. Here I argue for the opposite of Michael Clune’s reading of the ‘Ode’ in his book American Literature and the Free Market (pp.64-6). For Clune, commerce and desire here are consummate: “the desire of the collective blows through the priced objects of everyday life, infusing them with its aura.” Yet, contra to Clune’s notion of entirely fulfilled desire, Hazel Smith notes that “no more dying” could also be read as the end of sexual satisfaction (Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, p.78). At first glance, it may appear, through a carefully-judged set of antitheses focussing on love, death and life, which are forcefully combined throughout the poem’s three stanzas, that everything that happens here, happens “that love may live”. Yet the “symbol acknowledge[d]” in this new mode of living privileges “vulgar materialistic laughter / over an insatiable sexual appetite”, and the model of eternity advanced occurs as much through tedium as excitement: “not once but interminably”. Labour itself is removed: “buildings will got up into the dizzy air” as if they simply erect themselves – with the sexual pun intended – yet poverty rears its head through a gruesome image of intravenous feeding: “and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs / as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors / pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways”. Desire here is paradoxically ‘fed’ or sustained through a hunger connected to these “temporary neighbours” – perhaps suggesting the temporary sociality of the city, geographies of cruising, a queer space breaking out the repressive mould of the second stanza’s “heat-hating Puritan.” Yet the flipside of such a sociality, growing as it does out of the city’s contingency, is a class-based precarity potentially resulting in the very death the poem insistently and apparently denies.
The title of O’Hara’s poem is of course borrowed from a totemic ode to the new forms of social life named as humanism, or universalism, in Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s poem. This ode excludes as much as it includes. As Theodor Adorno wrote:
It is peculiar to the bourgeois Utopia that it is not yet able to conceive an image of perfect joy without that of the person excluded from it: it can take pleasure in that image only in proportion to the unhappiness in the world. In Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the text of the Ninth Symphony, any person is included in the circle provided he is able to call ‘even a single soul his own in this wide world’: that is, the person who is happy in love. ‘But he who has none, let him steal weeping from our company.’ Inherent in the bad collective is the image of the solitary, and joy desires to see him weep. Moreover, the rhyme word in German, ‘stehle’ [steal], points rightly to the property relationship. We can understand why the ‘problem of the Ninth Symphony’ was insoluble. In the fairytale Utopia, too, the step-mother who must dance in burning shoes or is stuffed into a barrel spiked with nails is an inseparable part of the glorious wedding. The loneliness punished by Schiller, however, is no other than that produced by his revellers’ community itself. In such a company, what is to become of old maids, not to speak of the souls of the dead?
Theodor Adorno (trans. Edmund Jephcott), Beethoven, The Philosophy of Music, pp.32-3Bearing this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that Schiller’s ode recurs today, in Beethoven’s setting, as the anthem for a political project – the European union – whose battering-down (for example) of Greece exactly captures that logic of inclusion, exclusion, sacrifice. By contrast, in O’Hara’s formulation, there is perhaps still a utopian expectation which isn’t entirely circumscribed by that which it knows it is the ideological manifestation of. The desire it expresses – which isn’t necessarily the one it can seem to express – is consciously bound up in that which inadequately releases or deflects it.
Yet the only way by which infinity (or desire) can manifest itself in Dobran’s poem is through an ouroborotic temporal relation very much connected to that which ‘the greatest day’ would seek to redeem, and without a trace of utopian aspiration, longing, or belief. “Today will be the same as today was.” Today will be – future tense – the same as today was – past tense – though ‘today’ itself is presumably present. In relation to such temporalities, we might consider a number of comparative instances from the poem, some already quoted. “Ready for beauty, I await / the greatest day”: beauty is that which will come, which is ‘awaited’, though it is unclear in what objects this abstract beauty will inhere.“You affirm at 06.34 ante-meridian / that the beauty of the globe is real”: beauty is affirmed in the present tense, as manifest in the globe itself. “We are the beautiful ones. / Everything that last night meant is shit”: beauty is again present, current, and, somewhere between the two previous examples (beauty as abstraction or beauty as the globe), has become the attribute of an unidentified collective subject. In the latter instance, the past is firmly rejected, even as the formula with which this paragraph begun, in which today will be the same as it has been, implies a folded-in encircling by the past. But if ‘last night’ promised some sort of temporal break-out, even one circumscribed by its placement in relation to the day – night as the time of (sexual?) release, or merely sleep, the escape of dream – it must be rejected. Beauty is not here connected to desire; it becomes an empty substitute for something perfected in the presence of manifest imperfection, something which stands in for referentiality, valourizing the (falsely) general over the particular, and coating it with an aesthetic sheen whose distance from the drab realities of office life lends at irony with which Dobran’s precisely plays.
This is “the auto-worship of the present”: a worship which is automatic, or a worship that takes itself as its object of devotion. Depending on how you read the hyphenated formula, this worship is done either by the celebrants who presumably include the poem’s speaker and others like him, or by the present itself which, like beauty, both attaches and refuses to attach to a specific referent. We celebrate the present and we are it, even as it denies us to ourselves. The present at the moment of speech must be the day, the poem’s emphatic temporal location, and day itself comes to seem to be the thing that both “disclose[s] / and exploit[s] the bodies / whose metabolic shifts / comprise” it.
Metabolism, a word deriving from the ancient Greek for ‘changeable’, is that process which allows organisms to grow, reproduce, excrete and in various other ways respond to their environments. In Dobran’s poem, this process of constant adaptation allows something like (the working) day to remain fixed – as in the endless small adjustments required by relations of cruel optimism, here rendered as a natural process. ‘Metabolic shift’ might also pun on shift work (itself another process of adaptation, availability, readiness); or, indeed, on John Bellamy Foster’s coinage ‘metabolic rift’ to describe Marx’s theorisation, in the third volume of Capital, of the means by which capitalist production and the growing division of town and country lead to an “irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” (See Foster, http://monthlyreview.org/2013/12/01/marx-rift-universal-metabolism-nature/)) Capital must use up natural resources to sustain itself, without the balancing of intake and outtake that metabolism itself involves; likewise, it uses up the workers on whom it relies, supplementing their intake only to the extent that it pays them enough to feed and live, or with the good life fantasies that promise something else, however deferred. Cruel optimism partially realizes – ‘disclose[s]’ this – and leaves itself open to be ‘exploit[ed]’ by it, even comes to desire such exploitation. The process is one of simultaneous clarity and concealment, perfectly balanced.
How to get out of this? In his recent review of Dobran’s book for Hix Eros 6, Tom Allen writes “There is no direct moment of rupture that I can locate in Story One.” Yet he goes on to identify in the poem what – though he doesn’t use this term – we might name a mode of Realism that is not simply a report on conditions as they are – though it is nothing if not that – which, in reporting on and inhabiting those conditions and contradictions, is not a settling for less; which, in apparently offering itself as a fait accompli, at the deferred and repeated beginning all over again, forces an implicit protest, however sarcastic and aware of its own limitations. At the conclusion of his review, Allen focuses on a section from roughly the middle of the poem. Dobran’s “The shell of the commute / is not the whole answer” is spoken “to myself / and to my listeners / in the back seat”, and the reason for this (“because”) is given as the fact that “the spirit unfolds in a slimy mass of visionary potential”. Yet this present unfolding occurs only “when I slide into my icy spot / in front of the building / adjacent to my office.”
It’s hard to read the tone of this characterisation of ‘spirit’ and ‘potential’. Spirit is uncapitalized and prefaced by the definite article, which at once particularizes it and refuses to give us a theoretical framework – say, a Hegelian one – into which we can definitely place it. The ‘slimy mass’, meanwhile is like a diseased, malevolent goo or virus, the alien Blob from the 1958 Steve McQueen drive-in classic (one of whose original titles was apparently ‘the mass’). It might also ventriloquize the traditional tone of class-hatred which disdains the greasy proletariat and sub-proletariat – after all, as noted earlier, the class-specific cruel optimism of the worker who “service[s] the petite-bourgeois / home improvement / industry” sustains itself by being, however drably, positioned in a better situation than those who have to perform other forms of labour – or indeed, than those who, being unemployed, are unable to sell their labour power at all.
Certainly, that would be one way of reading Dobran’s line, yet to describe this ‘mass’ as possessing a ‘visionary potential’ – where vision is not only the ability to see what is, but to see something else beyond it – is a direct juxtaposition which leaves some room for manoeuvre. The ‘shell’ recalls the ‘crust’ of deformation on p.10 - a container which is, perhaps, breakable, and out of which an as-yet-undefined magma or mass could emerge. (‘The crust of deformation’ further suggests a pun on ‘crustal deformation’, the changing of the earth’s surface by tectonic shifts within the earth’s crust which cause earthquakes.) Of course, the amorphous shape is exactly what the individuality of the individual worker is converted into in the capitalist structuring of work – the amorphous is not the negation of the closed-off and the singular, but what reduces humans to gallerte. In that sense, ‘potential’ might simply be exploitable labour-power, and one could see such undefined homogeneity as simply created by the apparent particularity of the office routine the poem describes; yet the spirit’s slimy, visionary mass, however much the poem guards itself against an optimism that might simply be cruel, does suggest something else. Yet to say this might seem to go against the way the poem itself actually seems to work, to make the kind of familiar critical manoeuvre or demand by which one is told that something which seems to do one thing actually does something else, usually something with a vaguely-defined political potential. But it is not the poem itself that will tell us what the ‘something else’ might be. Rather, as Allen suggests, looking back on Story One from a different situation – itself not a thought it is necessarily possible to properly think – might reveal to us the unanticipated kernel within its workings that it does desire.
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